I am really excited about this one guys. Thrilled, in fact. I held on to this post for a while because it was a Christmas present for my sister-in-law. I’m so excited to finally be able to share it!
This one requires some back story: My sister-in-law, Gina, is getting married in August and I really wanted to get her a bride-y Christmas gift. My first thought was a lingerie bag; it’s traditional, it’s sweet, it’s girly. I checked out Etsy but there was nothing that impressed me on there. Feeling bummed, I started to brainstorm. It hit me immediately – I’ll just make my own lingerie bag for her. Because I’ve been feeling more confident in my embroidery chops I decided I’d embroider something for her then make a bag out of it. When I saw this pattern on The Purl Bee I knew it would be perfect. (Does it look familiar? I dropped a tiny hint about it here.) I ordered the pattern and waited for it to arrive. Once I got it I picked out the color scheme – blue-gray fabric with silver-gray, brown, and champagne embroidery. I also picked up a zipper too now that I know how to sew on a zipper.
The pattern features four seasonal tree designs as well as the alphabet (uppercase, lowercase, & numbers) in a woodgrain design.
The pattern comes on several large sheets of transfer paper so I cut out the tree design and the letters I would need.
I then cut the fabric I would be embroidering on (that would later be sewed into the lingerie bag) into four 14″ x 17″ panels. I then washed and dried the panels. It’s super important not to skip them step when using iron-on transfers.
I centered and ironed on the tree design first. My goal was to get the design perfectly centered to give me a really large seam allowance on the edges of the fabric.
The iron-on transfer went on perfectly.
I then cut out the letters I wanted to use, measured them all out on the fabric to make sure the spacing looked good, and ironed them on. It says “Bride To Be” if you can’t see it clearly.
I started and finished the lettered embroidery on the flight to and from San Diego in the first week of December (9 hours logged on that).
The tree design was another story though. I worked nonstop on it for 3 weeks straight. I easily logged 30 hours embroidering the tree. In fact, I was embroidering, cutting, and sewing right up until the last few hours before we had to drive to New Jersey for Christmas. Talk about stressful. It was worth it though. Watching the design come to life as I worked was pretty amazing. I had never attempted, let alone finished, something this big and intricate. I am super proud of how it came out.
The main body of the tree, in progress:
Leaves (which I had to teach myself how to do through trial and error), in progress:
A full view of the tree in progress (it’s a bit hard to see because of the hoop lines/wrinkles):
Finally, the embroidering was done! I washed, dried, and ironed both pieces again to make sure there were no imperfections in the embroidery.
The final part was to sew the panels into a lingerie bag. The instructions are a little complicated to write out, I hope the pictures help make sense of it. I pinned the two embroidered panels and the two liner panels to the zipper and sewed them all together first.
The result was a crisp edge on each panel, sewed to the zipper.
I then sewed the two liner panels together and the two embroidered panels together.
I trimmed the excess so it wouldn’t get all bunched up when I turned the bag right side out.
When all the sewing was done it was time to turn the bag right side out. I ripped out a few stitches at the bottom of the interior lining and then slowly pulled the bag right side out.
When using this method it looks like the inside lining is the outside of the bag but after unzipping the zipper, I turned the bag right side out again bringing the exterior fabric to the outside.
When the bag was right side out I ironed it one more time to get all the wrinkles out.
The zipper turned out perfectly too which was a huge relief.
I love that the bag is lined: you can’t see the back of the embroidery and it will keep any dedicates inside safe.
Again, I can’t tell you how proud of this I am! The best part was seeing Gina’s face on Christmas day when she opened it. Totally worth all the work to give her this gift at such a special time.
